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Kant on the Ideality of Space

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Kenneth Rogerson
Kenneth Rogerson*
Affiliation:
Florida International University, Bay Vista Campus, North Miami, FL 33181, U.S.A
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Extract

In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argues for a position he calls transcendental idealism. And although it comes as no surprise to claim that Kant was an idealist, it is far from clear how this idealism should be understood. Traditionally, Kant’s idealism has been understood as a version of phenomenalism. ‘Objects of experience’ (appearances) are constructions of mental data caused by mind independent reality (the realm of things in themselves). This reading has been labeled the ‘ontological’ interpretation since on this view ‘objects of experience’ are ontologically dependent on our minds and ontologically distinct from the world outside of our minds. And, corresponding to the supposed ‘two worlds’ of objects, it is thought that Kant allows for two perspectives from which objects can be described. Human descriptions are limited to the mere collections of sense data while God can describe the set of objects outside our mind as they really are ‘in themselves.’

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , June 1988 , pp. 271 - 286
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1988

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References

1 Some of the more important proponents of this view are Gird, Graham Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (New York, NY: Humanities Press 1973)Google Scholar; Gerald, Prauss Kant und das Problem der Dinge an Sich (Bonn, West Germany: Bouvier Verlag H. Grundmann 1974)Google Scholar; Henry, Allison Kant’s Transcendental Idealism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1983)Google Scholar, ‘The Non-spatiality of Things in Themselves for Kant,’ Journal of the History of Philosophy 4 (1976) 313-21, and ‘Things in Themselves, Noumena, and The Transcendental Object,’ Dialectica 32 (1978) 61-76. See also Karl Ameriks’ excellent summary of this position in ‘Recent Work on Kant’s Theorectical Philosophy,’ American Philosophical Quarterly 19 (1982) 1-24. The term ’methodological’ is used by Allison to characterize his own position (see Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 25). Yet, Molke Gram and Carl Posy use the term ‘criteriological’ to describe the positions above. See Posy, ‘The Language of Appearances,’ Synthese 47 (1981) 313-52 and Gram, ‘Kant’s First Antinomy,’ reprinted in L.W. Beck, ed., Kant Studies Today (La Salle, IL: Open Court 1969), 210-29.

2 Henry Allison makes extensive ue of this notion in his Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. See the introductory discussion at p. 10f.

3 Strawson, Peter F. The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen 1966), 50Google Scholar and also his Individuals (London: Methuen 1959), part 1, chs. 1 and 2.

4 See Prichard, H.A. Kant’s Theory of Knowledge (London: Oxford University Press 1909), 36-70;Google Scholar Paton, H.J. Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience vol. 1 (New York, NY: Humanities Press 1936), 165-9)Google Scholar; and Kemp-Smith, Norman A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (New York, NY: Humanities Press 1923), 112Google Scholar.

5 Kant frequently characterizes the ideality claim .in terms of the character of our experience of objects: Space is the ‘mode (Art) of perceiving’ (A42/B59) or it is the ‘mode (Art) of intuition’ (A35/B52).

6 H.J. Paton, 168-9

7 The classical formulation of this often repeated criticism is by Adolf Trendelberg in his famous controversy with Kuno Fisher. For a summary of the debate, see M.J. Scott-McTaggart, ‘Recent Works on the Philosophy of Kant,’ reprinted in L.W. Beck, 1-71.

8 Again, this criticism has a long history. The first formulation of it seems to have been by Kant’s contemporary Jacobi, F .H. David Hume uber den Glauben, oder Idealism und Realismus, uber den tranzendentalen Idealism, Werke, vol. 2, Roth, F. and Kopen, F. eds. (Darmstadt, West Germany: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1968)Google Scholar.

9 It is important to note here that this sort of ideality claim does not say that we merely refer to our subjective states. To make such a claim would be to take a stand on one of the ultimate ontological possibilities described earlier (specifically case 1), but this is a stand we cannot take.

10 The idea of epistemic constraints on reference is worked out by Bencivenga, Ermanno in his ‘An Epistemic Theory of Reference,’ The Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983) 785-805CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Donnellan, Keith S. ‘Reference and Definite Descriptions,’ reprinted in Rosenberg and Travis, eds., Readings in the Philosophy of Language (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1971), 195-211Google Scholar

12 See Allison, Henry E. ‘The Non-spatiality of Things in Themselves for Kant,’ 313-21 and Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, 102-14Google Scholar.

13 This paper is a considerably revised version of one given before the 1984 Pacific Division APA meeting. I wish to thank G.J. Matey, my commentator on that occasion, for pointing the direction for future work on this problem. I would also like to thank Mark Kulstad (Rice University) for helpful criticisms on an earlier version of this paper.